Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/May 2023/Op-ed


 * By Hawkeye7



When people asked me what my doctoral thesis was about, I would reply: "logistics". There were two common responses. The first was to ask what that was. Today the word is more widely known, because it it written on the side of trucks. In the business world, logistics is about supply chain management. Military logistics, which is actually the older term, has a much broader meaning, encompassing the planning and carrying out of the movement and maintenance of forces.

The other common response was surprise that I was so engaging about the subject; many PhDs are dismissive, saying that it is too complicated for most people to understand. On the contrary, if you have done something as simple as planning a vacation, then you have come to grips with all the basics: transport to get there, stuff to take that you will want while you are there, food and water, and so on. You may also have run into constraints, such as baggage allowances. In military logistics, as in operations, time and space are critical constraints. Anticipation of contingencies and preparation for them is the key. The key difference is that the magnitude of our everyday experience is minuscule compared to that of military logistics.

Logistics is not a common area of interest, even among military historians, although the body of literature is growing. Edward Luttwak had this to say: "That only modern "scientific" military historiography can accommodate the study of military logistics is obvious enough, for only within it is the important given its due as compared to the merely dramatic. But there is also a more fundamental reason why the study of logistics is an eminently modern endeavour. For it is entirely characteristic of the modern mentality to find the subject itself very interesting, while it was evidently much less interesting to our pre-modern predecessors. The historiography of logistics of course deals with the question of how war was prepared and supplied as opposed to why it was fought, what battles and campaigns were fought, and why they were won or lost... such "how-questions" attract particular attention in our managerial and technological age, when readers are more apt to identify with managers, engineers, producers and consumers than with field commanders, soldiers or warriors. It stands to reason that readers so eager to discover how bread was baked and distributed in the peaceful urban commerce of the seventeenth century should find it yet more interesting to discover how it could be supplied to armies on the move, overcoming much greater managerial and technical challenges."

In the context of Wikipedia, the reader is already looking for information, so the challenge is to help them find it. The first logistics article I wrote was Allied logistics in the Kokoda Track campaign. I was not happy about what the campaign article had to say, so I wrote an entire new article. This eventually became featured. Although outside the scope of my thesis, which covered the subsequent Australian campaigns in the South West Pacific Area, the material for the article was already on hand.

My next logistics article was on British logistics in the Falklands War. I did not create this article; it had been created back in 2007, and had languished ever since. The Falklands War is pretty obscure today, because it is now as distant in the past as World War II was back then, but when I was a boy the Falklands War was the only recent war that was well-documented, so I collected a small shelf of books on the conflict. The war was unusual in many ways, one of which is that Major General Kenneth L. Privratsky wrote a book on logistics in the Falklands War. Having such a source was an enormous help. Not only was the sources and a framework for putting it together on hand, but the sources and the bibliography in the book pointed to where more information could be found, the works in question often being already on my shelf.

There was no such luck with my next logistics article project, INTERFET logistics, on the Australian intervention in East Timor in 1999-2000. I was asked to write this one. Sources were hard to come by. The official history of the intervention in East Timor had not yet been published. Now that it has appeared, I am reading through it with the intention of updating the article. I managed to assemble sufficient sources. East Timor is an unusual case of a multinational coalition in which a great power was not the lead nation. A lead nation in military logistics is like an underwriter, providing all the support that the others do not have. An express request that everyone bring their own logistical support was completely ignored.

The reality is that most of the nations of the world lack the logistical infrastructure to deploy forces outside their own national boundaries. Most of the rest have only marginal capability. Yet the case has been made that this is what should be studied; why study the logistics of the United States when such capability is out of reach of nearly every other nation? Once again though, operations were conducted in an underdeveloped location on short notice. That, at least, was an aspect it shared with the previous two logistics articles.

There are three ways of organising a logistics article: geographical, chronological and topical. In INTERFET logistics I copied the structure of British logistics in the Falklands War, so it is generally chronological, but this organisation did not fit so well, and the subsections are topical in organisation. This came to the fore when I attempted to cover the campaigns in North West Europe in 1944-1945. The Americans and British had entirely separate logistical organisations, so separate articles were in order. The coverage of the campaigns is uneven. The D-Day operation is covered by many sources, but the subsequent fighting in Normandy is not. For the British, I had good sources, but most were fairly old, dating back to the 1960s. The challenge was augmenting the article with recent material. There was a good book on US logistics in the Normandy campaign, and US logistics in that and the subsequent campaigns is covered by one of the Green books, Ruppenthal's two-volume magnum opus, Logistical Support of the Armies. Like me, he struggled with a tug-of-war between the chronological and the topical. Green books on the technical services and on operations supplement the narrative.

So that the readers would be able to find the logistics articles, they were paired with the ones on operations, with entries in the nav boxes, so an overarching chronological organisation was adopted. This divided things, roughly corresponding to the organisation of the on operations, with articles on Normandy, Northern France, the Siegfried Line Campaign and the Last Offensive. It is noticeable that although the Green book on The Last Offensive covers two campaigns, "Rhineland" and "Central Europe", and the number of US troops involved was greater than ever before and indeed on any before or since, there is only one volume. The campaigns of 1945 simply aren't well covered in the literature. The Siegfried Line campaign proved too big for one article, so I split it in two along topic lines: transportation, and services and supply.

So much for the historiography. It is my contention that it is impossible to understand how World War II was fought without an appreciation of the logistics involved. This is particularly true of the fighting in North West Europe in 1944-1945, where the strategy and operations were dictated by the logistics. The study of logistics often becomes a forest-and-trees experience, because understanding the details is crucial to understanding the big picture.

Let us start with shipping, because the efforts of the English-speaking nations depended on being able to move troops, raw materials and supplies across the oceans. Ships looked quite different in the 1940s compared to today. The biggest difference is that they are much smaller. The standard cargo ship of the day was the Liberty ship. These were about 10,000 tonnes deadweight, with a top speed of around 11 kn, relatively large and fast at the time. A bigger ship would have been able to carry more cargo, but would have required more, bigger or better engines (a production bottleneck). A slower speed would have negated the value of greater cargo capacity. A faster ship, the Victory ship, was indeed designed but few of them were in service before 1944.



A bigger ship would have also been a problem at the port. The draft of a Liberty ship was 8.5 metres, too great for most small ports. In most theatres of war there was demand for small coastal trading vessels (known as coasters) that could access such ports, and in North West Europe every available one was taken up, playing havoc with transport in the UK, which depended on them. This was before the advent of the shipping container, so cargo was carried in the bags, boxes, barrels and crates like you see out the back of a supermarket. To unload a ship, a cargo net was laid out on the deck and goods were piled on it. It was then lifted by a crane of the ship's own tackle. Goods were carried or moved on hand trolleys, so unloading a ship involved hard, manual labour. A good port with deep berths and cranes was essential, and securing them became an objective of the campaign.

Of course the Germans knew this too, so ports were heavily defended, and ingenious demolitions were carried out to block the channels and topple the cranes. The Allies countered by landing on beaches with ingenious techniques for supplying their forces over them. The Germans countered by attempting to delay the Allied advance until the weather turned too bad for support over the beaches. They very nearly succeeded too, and as more and more ships arrived unable to discharge, the resulting shipping crisis threatened to bring the US war machine to a halt, not just in the Europe but world-wide.

Fuel was transported in tankers, but they were much smaller than the tankers of today. Small tankers were in great demand, but few had been built before the war, and the war in Europe had to compete for them with the Pacific, where they were also needed. The British devised a system of floating discharge points, known as tombolas, that allowed tankers to discharge bulk fuel while standing ashore. The reason that small tankers were preferred, at least in the early stages, was the problem of where to store things ashore. This was done using prefabricated storage tanks. Later in the campaign the oil storage facilities at the ports were refurbished. Moving fuel in bulk required pipelines. The problem with these was their slow rate of construction. The alternative was packaged fuel. The jerrycan was a German invention, hence the name, and the design was so superior to anything the British or American armies had that they abandoned their containers in favour of it. Poor supply discipline resulted in hundreds of thousands of jerrycans being lost, and production could not keep up.



Clearing goods from the port required transport in the form or trains, barges or trucks. Getting the rail network going again required repairing the damage done by Allied bombing and German demolitions, and this could not keep up with the rapid advance in August 1944. Trucks were used, but there were problems. As with shipping, the reader may be surprised. Today semitrailers ply the highways of the US, but the interstates had not yet been built in the 1940s, so interstate freight was carried by the railways, and the number of large trucks built by the US automotive industry was comparatively small. When the army tried to get more, there was resistance from manufacturers, who did not want to tool up for products that would not be required after the war. They also objected to the Army's attempts to standardise, and to its demands for multi-wheel drives: what was wrong with their existing models?

The result was that in 1944 the Army was forced to rely on small trucks for long hauls, particularly the deuce and a half, which was only intended for short hauls between railheads and depots. This led to the famous but poorly organised Red Ball Express. Wear and tear, overloading, and accidents caused by fatigue and poorly-trained drivers all took their toll. Tyres were a particular problem, as the sources of natural rubber in South East Asia had been overrun by the Japanese, and the nascent synthetic rubber industry could not meet demand. A lot of damage was caused by carelessly discarded C ration cans.

Articles on US and British logistics invite comparison between them. The British had been in the war longer, and had learned many lessons. British commanders were more experienced and their logistical organisation was better. They did not have the resources of the Americans, and attempted to compensate with greater supply discipline and more efficient use of resources. The British positioned their forces on the coastal flank, so their supply lines were shorter and easier to operate.

There is still considerable work to do on military logistics. There is a growing volume of literature, and several wars that could be provided with logistics articles if someone wanted to take up the challenge. British and Canadian historians have done a great deal of work in recent times; unfortunately, Americans seem to be stuck on the Battle of the Bulge.